Loudspeakers

As Oscar Wilde once observed, “…but some of us are looking up at the stars. ” Actually, for budget-conscious audiophiles, it’s kind of mandatory. Personally, I fantasise about being able to drop £16. 5k on Bowers & Wilkins’ flagship 802 D3 floorstander – undoubtedly the thing my larger listening room has been missing out on for years.

It must be great to be Italian. For all the country’s quirks, it’s one of the richest seams of European culture and so much beauty has come from within its borders. Whereas we Brits can congratulate ourselves for inventing most of the essential tools for modern life – from the steam railway and the jet engine to the worldwide web – Italy has made things of great beauty, in so many forms. The sonnet is one such example – 14 lines of verse in iambic pentameter.

As the smaller of a brace of powered speakers, the MusicCast 20 represents the entry point of Yamaha’s wireless speaker range. MusicCast is the company’s ambitious multi-room system and as well as working on its own, the 20 can also be integrated with other MusicCast products as part of a multi-room or multi-speaker setup with products detecting one another for full flexibility and seamless integration around the home.

There is a school of thought among some loudspeaker buyers that a standmount design is a bit of a waste of time. The reason being that, as long as you aren’t intending to pop said loudspeakers onto a bookshelf, then by the time you have located them in your room and perched them on some suitable stands they take up roughly the same amount of room as some floorstanders, so why not just opt for them in the first place? While things are more complicated than this, you can see the logic.

Before we get to the brand new and rather imposing tower you see before you, a little Brit-fi archaeology. You’ve doubtless heard of Falcon Acoustics, not least for its assertion that among the host of latter-day copies, it makes the most authentic and accurate recreation of the legendary BBC LS3/5a standmount monitor. A decent enough claim to fame. But to fully appreciate the provenance of the company, its specialisations and its aspirations, we must dig deeper.

Back in 1974, Yamaha released the NS-1000 loudspeaker. A purple period for the company, it seemed to be launching an endless stream of great products. These effectively put Yamaha on the map as a serious hi-fi manufacturer, capable of innovation, superb quality and outperforming its rivals.

As a market, the budget loudspeaker sector is a hectic one at the best of times and most companies realise that to sit back on their laurels after a successful product launch is a bad move. Fortunately, as its press release points out: “ELAC can’t leave well alone”. As a result, barely two years after the game-changing Debut range arrived, we now see the Debut 2. 0, which includes the £299 B6.

Acoustic Energy made a great name for itself back in the late eighties and has gone from strength to strength ever since. Following a recent management buy out, the Gloustershire-based company has a renewed sense of momentum with various new speaker designs – several of which I have sampled – including the AE109 (HFC 425), a highly capable entry-level floorstander from its 100 Series.

Before we get to the brand new and rather imposing tower you see before you, a little Brit-fi archaeology. You’ve doubtless heard of Falcon Acoustics, not least for its assertion that among the host of latter-day copies, it makes the most authentic and accurate recreation of the legendary BBC LS3/5a standmount monitor. A decent enough claim to fame. But to fully appreciate the provenance of the company, its specialisations and its aspirations, we must dig deeper.

The powered speaker market – where a stereo amplifier is built into one of the loudspeakers – has become an increasingly popular area with those seeking desktop music systems. US brand Klipsch is embracing the versatile sector, and the R-41PM is a small powered design that’s closely related to its R-41M passive loudspeaker.

Having focused on conventional Bluetooth speakers in the past, Ruark is now moving into the multi-room realm with new models like the wi-fi-equipped MRx before you. Available with a walnut or soft grey finish, it’s a substantial bookshelf speaker, measuring 300mm wide, 180mm high and 180mm deep when lying flat in ‘landscape’ mode – although there’s a metal stand that also allows you to stand it upright if space is tight.

You certainly can’t accuse Sonos of resting on its laurels. The company already dominates the multi-room audio market with its Play range of speakers, and it moved quickly to introduce the new Sonos One (HFC 433) last year, adding support for Amazon’s Alexa voice technology, and pitching it as the “smart speaker for audiophiles”. Now, barely six months later, it’s introducing the Beam, which brings Alexa smart tech to the company’s range of television soundbars for the first time.

The genuine materialisation of Triangle’s philosophy”, is how the company describes this substantial floorstander – despite not being the flagship line. Instead, the Australe EZ is the top of the Esprit range, which is two below the top Magellan. You might say it’s ideal if you want the best performance and value mix.

When Monitor Audio first unveiled its Studio standmount loudspeaker at the Bristol Show in February, I was genuinely intrigued. Unlike pretty much everything else in the company’s extensive loudspeaker lineup, it doesn’t belong to a wider range of products but is instead a design that, for now at least, exists entirely on its own. It has no claims to multi-channel use or smart home integration and it surprised visitors to the show by debuting early, having been planned to launch at the Munich High End Show in May,but instead beingready in time to be on display at Bristol.

Our story starts with Joseph Léon, a man decorated for bravery for his work in the French Resistance during World War II. Later, as managing director of Multimoteur, he began manufacturing loudspeakers called Conques (French for shells, due to their elliptical shape), and then changed the name to Elipson (‘ellipse’ and ‘son’, the latter being the French word for sound).